As the controversies about the continuing presence of the monarchy swirl about, it is worth asking: how much of English/England is ‘original’?
By Pramod K Nayar
Hyderabad: As the world witnessed the coronation of Charles III, parallelly the usual controversies about the continuing presence of the monarchy, seen by many as an anachronism, swirl about. The role of the British monarchy vis á vis its former colonies is understandably an even thornier issue in the 21st century. This runs alongside the (national) pride expressed in people of Indian origin occupying places of authority in England, embodied currently in the form of Rishi Sunak. But then, Indians have been in the English parliament from the 19th century, with Dadabhai Naoroji elected from Finsbury Park in 1892.
Naoroji was a partner in the first Indian company in Britain, and later established his own firm. But, well before Naoroji, there were Indian princes and statesmen, families and businessmen, students and tourists who travelled through England or stayed there for lengthy periods of time. Preceding them was a pioneering businessman-traveller who went on to become the official ‘shampooing surgeon’ to the king of England and founded the first Indian eatery in London, the Hindostanee Coffee House, in 1809.
Dean Mahomet, designated the ‘first Indian author in English’ by the historian Michael Fisher, raised a subscription among Ireland’s elite to publish an account of his travels – a remarkable achievement for an immigrant soldier with no previous literary reputation. In the 230th anniversary year of The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1793-94), persons and products of Indian origin people the upper echelons of English society, menus and attire.
Much Englishness, it would seem, is foreign.
Immigrant Business
Dean Mahomet joined the entourage of Godfrey Evan Baker, an officer in the Company’s army in India. When Baker left for Ireland, Mahomet went with him, arriving in Cork in 1784. Eloping with Jane Daly in 1786, Mahomet rose in the social hierarchy of Cork, and his marriage to Daly, Fisher suggests, may have played an important part in this. After migrating to London, Mahomet met Basil Cochrane, a Scottish gentleman. And from here the immigrant’s life acquires a whole new colour.
Cochrane redesigned the ‘vapour bath’, a version of the steam baths popularised by the Turks since centuries. Dean Mahomet helped Cochrane set up the bath as a business in London. Mahomet struck upon the idea that a uniquely Indian element could be added to the business. This was Mahomet’s innovation: the champi, or shampooing. Mahomet worked this into Cochrane’s apparatus and the entire process, projected as therapy, became hugely popular among England’s elite.
• Much Englishness is, in fact, foreign
Meanwhile, Mahomet also set up his Coffee House in Portman Square. Mahomet added the hookah and Indian herbs, both exotica then, to the menu at the Coffee House, and emphasised the Indianness of the business. He advertised it thus:
Hindostanee Coffee-House, No. 34 George-street, Portman square—Mahomed, East-Indian, informs the Nobility and Gentry, he has fitted up the above house, neatly and elegantly, for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen, where they may enjoy the Hoakha, with real Chilm tobacco, and Indian dishes, in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England with choice wines, and every accommodation, and now looks up to them for their future patronage and support, and gratefully acknowledges himself indebted for their former favours, and trusts it will merit the highest satisfaction when made known to the public.
When the Coffee House failed, Mahomet filed for bankruptcy and moved to Brighton where he set up a shampooing bath-house and sold Indian hair dyes and tooth powder. But the big business was shampooing, and Mahomet emphasised the therapeutic benefits of this ‘art’:
Mahomed’s Steam and Vapour Sea Water Medicated baths…are far superior to the common Baths, as they promote copious perspiration, and never fail in giving relief when every thing else has been tried in vain, to cure many Diseases, particularly Rheumatic and Paralytic Affections of the extremities, stiff joints, old sprains, lameness, eruptions, and scurf on the skin, which it renders quite smooth; also diseases arising from the abuse of mercury, consumption, white swellings, aches and pains in the joints; in short, in all cases where the circulation is languid, or the nervous energy debilitated, as is well known to many professional gentlemen and others in this country. — Mr. M. has attended several of the Nobility with the happiest results…
He published a manual to promote his business, Cases Cured by Sake Deen Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon, And Inventor of the Indian Medicated Vapour and Sea-Water Baths in 1820, later expanding it as Shampooing, or, Benefits Resulting From the use of The Indian Medicated Vapour Bath, As introduced into this country by S D Mahomed. Soon after, he established ‘Mahomed’s Baths’ near the famous Brighton Pavilion. His success as a businessman was amplified when, among his clients, he could count kings George IV and William IV.
English Tastes
Mahomet was cashing in on the English taste for all things foreign, whether these were human jugglers, elephants or spices. It is indeed fascinating to see how much of England was always already orientalised and transnational in provenance. This cultural history of the foreignness of English taste can be found across its literature.
Tobacco, against which James VI railed in his A Counter-blaste to Tobacco (1604), was an exotic product that arrives in England from the ‘New World’ (the Americas). The first poetical reference to tobacco occurs in Edmund Spenser’s 1590-96 epic, The Faerie Queene. John Beaumont’s The Metamorphosis of Tabacco (1602) had praised tobacco’s ‘ethereal vapours’. Tobacco also figures in Ben Jonson and others of the era. Then came tea which then would be associated with the English way of life forever.
• Dean Mahomet pioneered Indian business in England, first with his Coffee House and then with his shampooing ‘champi’ service
Samuel Pepys in his diary entry of 25 September 1660 records the momentous occasion: ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before’. Peter Motteux’s A Poem Upon Tea (1712) began by listing the medicinal advantages of the drink. In William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), Mirabel announces that, after their marriage, he would allow Millimant to serve only ‘native’ drinks to visitors: ‘tea, chocolate and coffee’. This is odd because, none of the items on Mirabel’s list is native to England!
The essayist Joseph Addison’s emphatic statement from The Spectator suggests tea is English: ‘all well-regulated families … set apart an hour every morning for tea and bread and butter’. In The Task (1785), William Cowper paints a picture of such warm English domesticity, reliant on tea:
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
A century later, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) would depict the very English ritual of tea-drinking:
How pleasant it was in its air of perfect domestic comfort! How warm in its amber lamp-light and vermilion fire-flush! To render the picture perfect, tea stood ready on the table — an English tea, whereof the whole shining service glanced at me familiarly; from the solid silver urn, of antique pattern, and the massive pot of the same metal, to the thin porcelain cups, dark with purple and gilding.
Opium, of course, would be hugely popular too, thanks to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s documented habit and Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). Entire poems were written to opium, and may be taken to reflect prevalent English tastes: Sara Coleridge (‘Poppies’), Henrietta O’Neill (‘Ode to Poppy’), Anna Seward (‘To the Poppy’).
• National tastes were altered through the use of foreign products not just for the upper classes but in the everyday life of the common Englishmen and women too
Cotton was a prized possession among the English elite. After the initial years when the material was expensive, it became popular among the general public and Edward Terry, chaplain to the East India Company and travelling to India in 1615, complained in 1655 that even the commoners were now wearing Indian cotton. Other products would find their way to the English dining and dressing tables. Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock, spoke of the ‘unnumber’d treasures ope at once, and here, the various off’rings of the world appear’. Pope describes the items:
The board’s with cups and spoons, alternate, crowned,
The berries crackle, and the mill turns round;
On shining altars of Japan they raise
The silver lamp, and fiery spirits blaze:
From silver spouts the grateful liquors glide,
While China’s earth receives the smoking tide.
At once they gratify their smell and taste,
While frequent cups prolong the rich repast.
Coffee (which makes the politician wise,
And see through all things with his half-shut eyes)
Sent up in vapours to the baron’s brain
New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.
Coffee, sugar and lacquer are here signs of the English business class.
It is important to note that tastes were refined with foreign products not just for the upper classes but in the everyday life of the common Englishmen and women too. Thus, Joanna Baillie’s ‘Lines to a Teapot’ (1840) depicted even the working class Englishmen sipping tea:
what the changeful fleeting crowd, who sip
The unhonoured beverage with contemptuous lip,
Enjoy amidst the tangled, giddy maze,
Their languid eye — their listless air betrays.
In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Lady Bertram wants her nephew, William to go to the ‘East Indies’. Her reason is very simple: ‘that I many have a shawl. I think I will have two shawls’. As the critic Suzanne Daly puts it in her analysis of the circulation of the Kashmiri shawl in Victorian England, the foreign accessory was ‘a marker of respectable English womanhood and as magical and mysterious “oriental” garments’.
Unequal Transnationality
Mercantile capitalism and consumption merged through the centuries, demonstrating not just a transnationalisation of English tastes, but also that England’s imperial reach was ever-expanding. Today we recognise this merger for its ruthless and exploitative nature: slavery in the New World, for instance, facilitated the consumer culture of Europe.
In Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea (2010), the plantation owner Valmorain declares:
Someone must manage the colonies if you are to put sugar in your coffee and smoke a cigar. In France they avail themselves of our products, but no one wants to know how they are obtained… At the time Toulouse Valmorain arrived there [in Haiti, where Allende’s novel is set], a third of the wealth of France, in sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and cocoa, came from the island…
The ruthlessness with which the African, Asian and South American populations were exploited was often masked by Europeans, some of whom even suggested that the slaves were happy to work on the plantations. For example, James Grainger’s long poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) was a paean to the crop and glorified slavery by demonstrating how ‘with placid looks’ and ‘willing ardour’ the slaves went to work.
• Tobacco was an exotic product that arrives in England from the ‘New World’ (the Americas)
As the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has argued in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1986), sugar refined European tastes, and the plantation determined its economy. The environmental historian Jason Moore has argued that capitalism was an ‘environment-making revolution’. He notes that across Europe and the New World, capitalism’s progress and industrialisation altered the landscape:
In northeastern Brazil at the height of the sugar boom in the 1650s, 12,000 hectares of forest were cleared in a single year … In the same period, the Vistula Basin was cleared on a scale and at a speed between five and 10 times greater than anything seen in medieval Europe… on the commodity frontiers — such as the Madeira and Canary islands, the Erzgebirge Mountains, the Andes, north-eastern Brazil, or the Baltic’s timber-export zones — capitalism radically changed life and land within a generation or two…
English tastes and habits grew out of its transnational exchanges and imperial processes.
The question will trouble us (and the English) for a very long time: how much of English/England, or for that matter any nation/culture, is ‘original’ or from one single provenance, or pure?
(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)